Competition between Cooperative Projects

Abstract

A paper needs to be good enough to be published; a grant proposal needs to be suciently convincing compared to the other proposals, in order to get funded. Papers and proposals are examples of cooperative projects that compete with each other and require eort from the involved agents, while often these agents need to divide their eorts across several such projects. We aim to provide advice how an agent can act optimally and how the designer of such a competition (e.g., the program chairs) can create the conditions under which a socially optimal outcome can be obtained. We therefore extend a model for dividing eort across projects with two types of competition: a quota or a suc-cess threshold. In the quota competition type, only a given number of
the best projects survive, while in the second competition type, only the projects that are better than a predened success threshold survive. For these two types of games we prove conditions for equilibrium existence and eciency. Additionally we nd that competitions using a success threshold can more often have an ecient equilibrium than those using a quota. We also show that often a socially optimal Nash equilibrium exists, but there exist inecient equilibria as well, requiring regulation